My dad named me Jenepher: J-E-N-E-P-H-E-R. I know of exactly one Jenepher in the world (Google agrees), and it’s me. He didn’t spell it that way to be different: he’s an engineer, more focused on function than form. He just can’t spell. He thought Jennifer was like Christopher.
I love my dad, but I mostly didn’t love (certainly didn’t appreciate) Jenepher with a PH. When I was young, I went by “Jeni” (yeah, my dad probably came up with that spelling, too). We moved a lot, and even though it was easy enough for a new teacher in a new school to pronounce, I was always having to spell out my name and re-spell it. When I considered my name, I thought about how I was always correcting people. When anyone would ask me my name, I quickly learned to say, in one quick run-on sentence – “Jenepher. J. E. N. E. P…” By the time I got to “P,” they would stop and ask me to spell it again. Slowly. And I complied. Spelling out this weirdness. Again and again and again. It was a pain, but a small pain: I didn’t think it was a burden to have a common name that was spelled funny.
I didn’t think it was very unique, though, either. And at seventeen in high school, I hated anything that was run-of-the-mill ordinary.
A common name with a unique spelling wasn’t different enough. Thus began my name-switching woes.
A small aside: I eschewed the ordinary so much that I went 3,000 miles across the country to a small liberal arts college no one in my small town in Maine – including my guidance counselors – had ever heard of.
As fortune would have it, my freshman roommate was also named Jennifer but spelled the usual way. Thus, college seemed a perfect opportunity to reinvent myself, killing two birds with one stone. Three birds, really. I wouldn’t have to spell my name all the time. I wouldn’t get confused with my roommate. And I could rid myself of my run-of-the-mill, ordinary name – not in line with the unique, rebellious self I thought myself – forever.
I started going by Allie, a diminutive form of my middle name, Alice. I’m named after my mom’s best friend from childhood, who died of kidney disease years ago. I liked the idea of not being Jenepher anymore. I liked the thought of carrying her memory along, too.
Fast forward twenty or thirty years. I’m trying to simplify my life, and the extra names are holding me up. I’ve spent decades switching between two names and two personas – Jeni (to family and high school friends, as well as anyone official, like the IRS or the bank) and Allie (to everyone else). It seemed a nice way to separate distinct parts of my life, but it’s a little disorienting, and adds a lot of complication to my life. For example, I have four variations of gmail, two Apple IDs, and three or four Facebook accounts, some of which I never, ever look at. It’s hard to keep track of which email I’ve used for which online sites (and having different login emails makes it impossible to use FastPass). And how awkward is it when someone asks my name, and I pause, wondering how they know me?
I’d like to go back to Jenepher and reclaim my uniqueness. I’ve moved back to Maine, and Jeni is how most people there know me, so this is the time to do it. But I worry that that would be hard for my adult friends, and confusing for my kids. I’m probably not giving them enough credit.
I just need to decide to take that leap. It was so much easier to leap at 18.
But that’s another story.